Competition: Google Places API Developer Challenge 2012

Deadline 10/31

The power of places and big data for good: Google Places API Developer Challenge 2012

By Carlos Cuesta, Google Maps API Product Marketing Manager

Cross-posted with the Google Geo Developers Blog

How would you make your community or local government run better? In our first Google Places API Developer Challenge, we’re inviting developers around the world to make something that improves their communities or governments by using the Google Places API and its database of places and tools. The developers of the winning applications will receive a VIP experience at Google I/O 2013.

You might create an app or site that solves health problems, understands crime patterns, or improves commerce. You can use any platform as long as you build with the Google Places API and it benefits your community or government. We’re looking for your best and most innovative ideas.

Built on the comprehensive global database of more than 95 million places that powers Google Maps, the Google Places API enables you to search for information about a variety of nearby places such as establishments, geographic locations and prominent points of interest. You can re-rank place results based on user check-ins, and create new places specific to your app.

To help you develop your ideas and build better apps, we’ve been working with local government officials in Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Louisville, New York City, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle along with the White House to surface a wide variety of data sets for your apps. You can find these data sets and more on the Google Places API Challenge site at http://developers.google.com/challenge and hear more about what cities have to say about the challenge here. You can also follow updates and hangouts about the challenge on +Google Maps API.

The submission window opens on August 15th and closes on October 31st, 2012.

We look forward to seeing what can happen when your imagination and the Google Places API come together!

Competition: viz of civic health data

Via our collaborator Carol Strohecker at CDI

http://www.civicdatachallenge.org/

Competition: IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge; Student Project Competition -- deadline November

Some of you may want to develop your projects toward this competition.
Benjamin Watson
Director, Design Graphics Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.

919-513-0325 | designgraphics.ncsu.edu | @dgllab

IBM and IEEE are in search of creative team based student projects that can help students at any level learn about applying engineering, science and other disciplines to solve real world problems. It's a great opportunity to put your engineering skills to use…and earn cash prizes too!

The competition is open to college/university students from all geographic locations. Student teams should have three to five members in any year of university study. At least one team member must be an IEEE member. To find out more about this exciting opportunity, visit: http://www.ieee.org/go/smarter_planet_challenge or email smartplanetchallenge@ieee.org.

Competition: International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge

Help people understand science with apps, games, or visuals. 

Data: NASA Tournament Lab holds a contest for programmers who can improve access to its data archives

100tb of data! The NASA tournament lab sounds interesting. 

NASA Tournament Lab holds a contest for programmers who can improve access to its data archives

Ars Technica

NASA is using its NASA Tournament Lab on TopCoder to attack its galactic-scale pile of remote mission data. Over the years, NASA has accumulated over 100 terabytes of data from space missions, and the sheer size of the archive makes it difficult to manage the data and make it available.

Anyone can look at the archive at NASA's Planetary Data System website. What NASA would like someone to do is not only make that data more accessible for scientists, but also package it up for non-scientists to access and manipulate. The agency hopes that school children, teachers and parents, game designers, or almost anyone will hit up the database and find more uses for it than solely science. In a practical sense, the more people accessing the database, the better a case NASA can make for its worth to American society.

The prize is up to $10,000 (and the coveted crown for Space Coder of the Galaxy 2012) for "coders, mathematicians and creative thinkers" to brainstorm new ideas for NASA's planetary science data. You can find more details over at NASA's PDS Challenge home page.

Competition: The world codes for NASA in International Space Apps Challenge

The world codes for NASA in International Space Apps Challenge

An international code-a-thon is set to take place in April on seven continents. And in space. From April 21-23, the 48-hour International Space Apps Challenge (ISAC) will take place in tech hubs and other spaces from San Francisco to Sao Paolo, Jakarta to Antarctica—and aboard the International Space Station. Crew members of the McMurdo Station in Antarctica and the ISS will participate, depending on the days’ work demands. Those who cannot attend at one of the code-a-thon locations are able to register independently to participate online.

#more 

ISAC is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in conjunction with the Second Muse think tank, and in cooperation with other space agencies. During the event, "citizens from around the world will work together to solve current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need... using minimal resources and maximum brainpower to create outside-the-box solutions in response to interesting problems," according to the organizers.

Participants will form teams and tackle a set of pre-determined challenges that include creating an interface for NASA's planetary data, developing an HTLM5 tablet app for citizen scientists using earth science data from NASA's Earth Observations site, and an open data challenge that will use information from the Kepler space observatory.

One of the intriguing elements of the challenge is the goal to "(e)ngage citizens in countries with little or no investments in space exploration to contribute to space exploration through open source, open data, and code development." This is one of the reasons the challenge is being hosted by, among others, Nairobi, Kenya's iHub. Kenyans are not renowned for their space program but they are well known for their coding chops.

“We recognize that there are skilled and talented developers, makers and creators all around the world and we are excited to see what they...

Competition: Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissions

A competition in news oriented visualization and apps. 

Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissions

Google

Last November, we announced our support for a new Data Journalism competition, organized by the Global Editors Network. The competition is now open to submissions and today we hosted an event at our offices in London to share details on how to compete and win a total of six prizes worth EUR 45,000. The European Journalism Centre is running the contest and Google is sponsoring.

Journalism is going through an exciting—if sometimes wrenching—transition from off to online. Google is keen to help. We see exciting possibilities of leveraging data to produce award-winning journalism. “Data journalism is a new, exciting part of the media industry, with at present only a small number of practitioners,” said Peter Barron, Google’s Director of External Relations. “We hope to see the number grow.”

In data journalism, reporters leverage numerical data and databases to gather, organize and produce news. Bertrand Pecquerie, the Global Editor Network’s CEO, believes the use of data will, in particular, revolutionize investigative reporting. “We are convinced that there is a bright future for journalism,” he said at the London event. “This is not just about developing new hardware like tablets. It is above all about producing exciting new content.”

The European Journalism Centre, a non-profit based in Maastricht, has been running data training workshops for several years. It is producing the Data Journalism Awards website and administering the prize. “This new initiative should help convince editors around the world that data journalism is not a crazy idea, but a viable part of the industry,” says Wilfried Ruetten, Director of the center.

Projects should be submitted to http://www.datajournalismawards.org. The deadline is April 10, 2012. Entries should have been published or aired between April 11, 2011 and April 10, 2012. Media companies, non-profit organisations, freelancers and individuals are eligible.

Submissions are welcomed in three categories: data-driven investigative journalism, data-driven applications and data visualisation and storytelling. National and international projects will be judged separately from local and regional ones. “We wanted to encourage not only the New York Times’s of the world to participate, but media outlets of all sizes,” says Pecquerie. “Journalism students are also invited to enter, provided their work has been published.”

An all-star jury has been assembled of journalists from prestigious international media companies including the New York Times, the Guardian and Les Echos. Paul Steiger, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, will serve as president.

Winners will be announced at the Global News Network’s World Summit in Paris on May 31, 2011.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations

Find: A Site for Data Scientists to Prove Their Skills and Make Money

Focused on data mining, but certainly viz has a role. 

A Site for Data Scientists to Prove Their Skills and Make Money

Kaggle connects data scientists with organizations that need someone to extract meaning from their data, like insurance companies that want to know the likelihood that a patient will be hospitalized.

Competition: The Information Is Beautiful Awards

Annual competition deadline march. Monthly starts sept 19. 

The Information Is Beautiful Awards

Competition: visualizing marathon

Late in the year in nyc.

Updates to the 2011 Visualizing Marathon Program

via (title unknown) by Charlene Manuel on 9/8/11

Abstract: 

Announcing two big updates to the 2011 Visualizing Marathon Program: the New York's Marathon dates are now November 5-6 and the Germany Marathon will now take place in Berlin (December 3-4).

We’ve had a great response from both students and schools in all of the Marathon locations and we have two big updates to the 2011 Visualizing Marathon Program.

New York Date Change

Due to Yom Kippur and the Columbus Day holiday, we’ve changed the dates for the Visualizing Marathon competition in New York to November 5-6 so that everyone can participate. We are still planning the same great event, just for a different weekend.

Thu, 2011-09-08

read more

Competition: NSF & AAAS Science: Visualization Challenge -- entries due Sept. 30, 2011

Deadline is too soon, but it may be interesting to keep your results from this semester until next year.

Best,

Ben

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Zemankova, Maria <mzemanko@nsf.gov>
Date: Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:15 PM
Subject: NSF & AAAS Science: Visualization Challenge -- entries due Sept. 30, 2011
To: GV_PIs@nsf.net

The Deadline is Less Than a Month Away!   The SciVis Challenge recognizes scientists, engineers, visualization specialists and artists who produce beautiful science visualizations. Winning entries will be published in Science and Science Online, and will be displayed on the NSF website. Help spread the word by posting the attached flyer where interested colleagues and friends will see it. Thank you!   Now You Can:   Submit your entries online   Read what the judges think about the entries   Vote for your favorite entry--People's Choice   Share your favorite entries on Facebook and Twitter Award Categories:   Photography   Illustrations   Informational Posters and Graphics   Videos   Interactive Video Games     Learn About the Challenge: Challenge Website Complete Entry Information

 

I would like to encourage you to submit an entry to this Visualization Challenge.

 

Maria

 

*************************************************************
Maria Zemankova, Ph.D. 
Program Director, Information Integration & Informatics (III), Graphics & Visualization (GV)
Information & Intelligent Systems Division (IIS)
Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate (CISE)
National Science Foundation (NSF)
4201 Wilson Blvd. #1125
Arlington, VA 22230

Email: mzemanko@nsf.gov  
Phone: 703-292-7348         Fax:  703-292-9073
http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=IIS

http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf11556
*************************************************************

 

 

 

See the full gallery on Posterous

See the full gallery on Posterous

scivis_flyer.pdf Download this file

Competition: Museum Visualization Competition: More Information

Not interactive tho. 

Museum Visualization Competition: More Information

Competition: The Open Call HTML5 Challenge

Too soon for our class, but keep it in mind for next year? Also, check out the resources for html5 available through the site: https://sites.google.com/site/opencallforgdd/resources-1


Countdown to the Open Call HTML5 Challenge

Viz: Map your moves is a project produced for WNYC

Color meaning non-obvious.

poptech:Map your moves is a project produced for WNYC’s data...